Cato asked many of its scholars to evaluate Trump’s first 100 days. I wrote about the constitutional and legal dimensions.
Trump has systematically overstepped the constitutional and legal constraints on his power and then attacked the legitimacy of the courts when they’ve moved to stop him. That includes areas like the claimed power to suspend duly passed laws, as in the TikTok case; impoundments premised on the idea of a broad presidential right to ignore congressional appropriation bills that the Supreme Court is unlikely to endorse; moves to impose arbitrary punishments on law firms for representing his adversaries; and coercive pressure against states and universities that violate established High Court precedent on the First Amendment and federalism.
Reasonable people can differ about many of the goals he’s pursuing, but I would hope we’d all agree that he needs to start pursuing them within the law and with due respect for the checks and balances provided in the Constitution.
David Bier (immigration) and Patrick Eddington (homeland security and civil liberties) were among colleagues who wrote contributions on closely related legal and constitutional issues.
While on the subject, my Cato colleague Ilya Somin had the distinction of being included in two notable roundups of legal scholars’ 100-day evaluations of the administration, which ran in the New York Times and the Free Press. Both panels queried a wide ideological array of experts and got a near-unanimous answer: Yes, Donald Trump is breaking the law, as a matter of purpose and policy. I summarize some of the highlights at my Substack.